Robin Guenther, Architect of Healthy Hospitals, Dies at 68

One of her standout works was the Center for Discovery in Harris, N.Y., a 27,000-square-foot treatment facility in Westchester County for children and adults with severe neurological impairments that opened in 2002. The structure, airy and barnlike, is made from renewable, nontoxic materials, and heated and cooled by a geothermal system.

In 2003, Ms. Guenther, working with a team that included Gail Vittori, a sustainability expert who had been designing policy initiatives and protocols and creating standards for green building since the 1980s, and Tom Lent, then the policy director for the Healthy Building Network, created the Green Guide for Healthcare, a set of environmentally conscious, health-based building standards customized for the health care industry.

Modeled after the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED certification program for rating sustainability in buildings, the guide covered a wide range of topics, including how to avoid toxic chemicals, the importance of natural light to support circadian rhythms, and the need to provide places of respite and connections to nature.

By the second year of its release, the guide had been downloaded 11,000 times in every U.S. state and in more than 80 countries. It became the basis for LEED certification specific to the health care sector.

Still, skeptics felt that green building in the health care industry would be cost-prohibitive. So Ms. Guenther, Ms. Vittori and others conducted two studies that showed that these projects cost nearly the same as conventional ones. In 2007, Ms. Guenther and Ms. Vittori published “Sustainable Healthcare Architecture,” which included case studies of more than 50 projects. In 2014, Ms. Guenther delivered a TedMed talk titled “Why hospitals are making us sick,” which has been viewed tens of thousands of times.

In an email, Mr. Lent said that “Robin understood at a deep level the responsibility of the architect, engineer and interior designer (really everyone involved in bringing buildings into the world) for the health, environmental and social impact of the materials they specified and the designs they created.”

He added that she had “worked tirelessly to wake up the health care industry and the design and construction firms that work with them to this responsibility.”